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# 2022-05-31 - Head Hunting in the Solomon Islands by Caroline
# Mytinger
Portrait of author and friend
# Acknowledgments
[An Irish Ferryman got the idea that the authors needed money.] So
on the far side of the lake he dug down into his pocket and brought
up three shillings which he offered to us, apologizing for the amount
by saying that at least it would buy us a spot of tea some time when
we needed it. And if we felt indebted we should just pass it on some
time to someone else who needed a few shillings. The knowledge that
such human goodness is abroad carried us along almost as much as the
less abstract help we received. And it still keeps us from coming
unstuck in a world of hates between nations and peoples and
individuals.
# Chapter 1
We were a staff of two rather young women: myself, the portrait
painter [the author, Caroline Mytinger, is also the portrait
painter], and Margaret Warner, the bedeviled handyman, who was
expected to cope with situations like God--if machinery was lacking,
then by levitation. Her expedition equipment was a ukulele.
The purpose was to make a pictoral record of... headhunting
cannibals, called Melanesians, who inhabit the islands bordering the
Coral Sea northeast of Australia. Their territory begins on the
mainland of New Guinea in the north and extends through the Solomon
Islands clear to New Caledonia in the south.
[The very simplicity of our plan and purpose] shows, perhaps, just
how mature we were when we set off on our project. Scope is the one
thing we had plenty of. But possibly, too, those disbelieving
friends had a case when they said no female outfit such as ours could
go alone to paint headhunters and come back with their own heads. No
man had done it. No man had yet tried, we replied.
[They planned to pay their way as they went by earning money through
portrait commissions.]
All this time we were reading anthropology, everything written about
human beings that was available for borrowing from public and
university libraries. It was not a highbrow choice; reliable
accounts of peoples are actually the most exciting literature there
is, stranger than fiction.
... it took us over a year to earn our way with portrait commissions
to the heart of Melanesia [from San Francisco].
... being on an expedition that was earning its own way was much more
like being on a Winnie-the-Pooh "Expotition." Anything could happen.
# Chapter 2
[On a steamer ship with about 50 passengers.]
The technique was simple. Margaret would ask someone to pose for me
"just for fun," then everyone else, seeing what a remarkable likeness
came out of the cigarette tin [of art supplies], would scramble for a
sitting. Toward the end of the trip if there were any laggards they
would be rounded in if only by shipboard ennui.
Margaret is the only player I have ever known who could make a
ukulele sound like a musical instrument, and her repertoire ranged
from everything to keep dear old ladies awake to the sort of thing
that made a captain's foot wag. [To keep them entertained and
sitting still while their portrait was being drawn.]
With so many opinions [about taking quinine as a preventative measure
for malaria, or waiting until you got malaria before taking quinine]
we had to settle the matter for ourselves, and we thereupon decided
to settle it for all expeditions to come by becoming experimental
guinea pigs. Margaret would continue her daily doses, and I would
drop them.
# Chapter 3
All the elements present on the [steamer ship] Mataram which should
have combined to make the journey a profitable one for us... were
reduced to exactly zero... by the shock of the Malaita affair.
A week before [the author's passage] Malaitamen in the mountain
village of Sinarango had murdered an entire government party!
... the usual conservative press referred to it as a "massacre" and
an "uprising"...
There was a curious atmosphere on board the Mataram, rather hard to
describe because those who expressed it were British and not
American. Where Americans would have been yapping and speculating
endlessly, these Britishers clamped down their long upper lips over
false teeth, and waited. They hung over the radio bulletins...
....they conveyed something extra by staring in silence at one
another after each remark.
Without ever having met a Malaitaman we could see that they had no
love for their employers.
We now heard that the planters and missionaries of Malaita had
evacuated the island; women even from other islands were coming into
Tulagi for safety.
# Chapter 4
The planters as they appeared in Tulagi full of revenge were set to
drilling eight hours a day under the hot sun with the intention of
sweating out of them the idea of being a volunteer army. They had
stuck it out and in the end got regular military status with army
pay, rations, and a [commanding] officer. But one of the irregular
rations they had demanded and obtained was a quart of good whiskey
per week per man to be taken as a MEDICINE for malaria. Everyone
took it as a preventative, naturally...
[The steamer Mataram was destined to continue on the Malaita. The
author and her assistant chose to go on to Malaita with it.]
# Chapter 5
My fingers were swollen, banana-sized, by the exercise and heat of
last night's gaiety [at a dance].
We had heard a lot about the laziness of these "black swine" [the
dark-skinned laborers] on the trip up, but I had never seen men of
any color work so fast. These first Melanesians were surely unlike
any other aggregate of men in the world.
# Chapter 6
[At Su-u] The missionaries and planter's wife were refugees in
Guvutu and Tulagi, and the planter himself, the remaining white man,
was staying on his launch [at] nights for safety. From what?
Business was going on as usual this day.
# Chapter 7
The natives scattered from the villages and the white avengers burned
those villages, destroyed gardens, and left the entire mountain
district "greatly chastened." ... to destroy the food of even an
enemy was inconceivable... in this port country. Seven of the
prisoners died in jail while still awaiting their trial... Of the
remaining captives [about 100], six were found to be the actual
instigators of the murders, and these were hanged... Of the
remainder... several were given lengthy jail sentences... and the
rest were returned to their mountains properly subdued. A suddenly
paternal government provided them with enough rice to keep them from
starving...
What was the cause behind this wholesale murder? The government
party that was wiped out had been on duty attempting to collect taxes
from the Sinarangoans. ... the natives have no voice in the
administration of their affairs. "Taxation without representation"
is what we called it. On the other hand, the mothers of large
families were given a bonus... Unless the lagging birth rate is thus
stimulated, the naive population decreases and the source of
plantation labor dwindles in proportion. And without cheap native
labor it would be unprofitable for any nation to hold these islands.
They also "encourage" the natives to work on plantations where they
are personally exempt [from taxes if they work.]
Looking at it from the native viewpoint--as if there should be any
other!--these taxes seem to pay only for the privilege of being
deprived of liberties.
Then how is it that a people reputedly so tough and so far
outnumbering the whites can have been induced, without wholesale
bloodshed, to relinquish their freedom? The process is known as
"peaceful penetration"--a most exquisite piece of machinery such as
could have been devised only by God-sent Empire Builders.
Inoffensive missionaries are the real trail blazers, sometimes
preceding even the Empire Builders. Encouraged by the island
administrations they make their honestly peaceable calls on villages
which have never before had any contact with white men--then later
comes the patrol officer.
The guv'men man is a nice fellow, lavish with presents of tobacco,
calico lap-lap, and the much-needed axes, and if some chief seems to
think he smells badly, the patrol officer simply flatters a rival
sorcerer by appointing him headman (with a pretty cap and belt) over
the head of the one who won't play. This cap and belt do the work.
It is then the duty of the new headman to see that the natives have
ready the tax coconuts for the patrol officer when he returns the
following year to collect them. The officer departs, doling out a
little more tobacco to any noisy grumblers, and the next year he
returns, collects the taxes, lays down a few primary taboos [legal
restrictions], and adds a threat of jail to any delinquents if they
fail to pay up the next year. It takes time but good Empire Builders
are patient. The following year a few truculent villagers have to be
made an "example" of by being taken down to jail at the coast
government station. And from then on "control" is complete, and the
operations of "peaceful penetration" proceed up higher into the
mountains.
... in the interior of Malaita, newly visited villages often told a
government patrol officer to go to hell; if he poked his offensive
head in the clearing the following year, or any year after, it would
be promptly bludgeoned. This is what the Sinarangoans told the
government man on his first call there, and when he turned up the
following year--the year of [our] Expotition--that is what they did.
# Chapter 9
We sail close in shore before a fine following wind, with the ocean
head a gently danging expanse of diamonds--no color to it, no blue
anywhere, with the sun on top. The jib boom... soars up and up as
the boat lifts on a swell, straight up past the shimmering horizon
into the sky, then ever so slowly pokes down into the glittering sea.
And up again. Flying fish spray out with the foam before the prow,
their iridescent wings motionless, tails flipping violently as they
hit the water to take off again. There is the sweet creaking of the
main sale boom tugging at the mast and these little tunes taut ropes
sing; and all the while the gentle gushing sound that water makes
when it is running with the boat. The wind is blood temperature and
in this flawless moment we feel as if we love and are loved very
deeply.
[In a storm, the engine stalled and the author's supply case with all
her tools and work went into the sea. They recovered the supply case
later, but it had been submerged in the ocean.]
# Chapter 10
For the first week at Ruavatu we did nothing but try to salvage
drawing materials and nurse our other supplies back to health. The
supply trunk must have stayed in the ocean for some time because even
after the contents were taken out there was about a foot of water in
the bottom of it.
Those hundreds of crayon pencils, being waterproof wax, should not
have been damaged, but the wood of pencils is made of two sections
glued together, and these all came unglued.
When the full extent of the damage had been realized we tightened our
belts, held out heads, and wrote out a long, expensive radiogram to
an art supply firm in Sydney requesting a waterproof oil painting
outfit, no matter how heavy it was to carry. But sending a radiogram
in the Solomon Islands is not a simple matter even if you have the
gold it costs. The wireless station was at Tulagi and Tulagi was
thirty miles away. Also Ruavatu had no launch. ... on account of
the Malaita war... the radio talk-talk therefore had to be given to a
runner who theoretically tore off with it for Berande. The Mastah
there would then take it two Tulagi on his next trip and when the
Mataram returned in six weeks the art supplies would be on it.
But these were not ordinary times. The very vibrations of the
Expotition's approach always seemed to create an extraordinary time.
# Chapter 12
It was a secret yearning of many Americans in this driven span; the
wish to relax, to be beautifully ambitionless and amount to
nothing--but with an excuse that the Puritans would approve of.
And here we were on a tropical island forced to live the dream life.
[Due to a measles epidemic.]
From the United States to eastern Europe the natives swear by grain
alcohol as a means of forgetting reality. From the west coast of the
Americas to about the date line in the Pacific escape is achieved by
means of the raw juices of a variety of pepper root, called Kava.
The betel-nut area extends from Melanesia to India and identifies
these users as one big cultural unit distinct from the Oceanic kava
sots. And the [Asians] distinguish themselves by going for narcotics.
[The author and her assistant tried betel nut and didn't like it.]
... and if the experiment decided anything it is that the habitual
betel-nut chewers of the world must be almost a desperate and hardy
as we were during Prohibition.
The rows of [coconut] trees must be precisely thirty feet apart, so
that the same amount of sun reaches the ground everywhere through the
tract. All this orderliness would seem to delete any beauty, but it
is that very orderliness that makes the plantation so beautiful. The
impression inside the stand is that of a vast cathedral. There are
acres and acres; great columns of cool, gray trunks, ringed to a rich
texture where the old fronds have fallen off, all towering evenly to
fifty or sixty feet from the ground. The ropelike roots above the
earth form an ornamental base to each pillar, and at the top is a
rich capital of clustered taupe-colored nuts with flags of
henna-brown fiber. From there the great strong arms of the fronds
sweep out to meet those of neighboring trees, forming a groined vault
ceiling with interstices of criss-crossed leaflets. With the white
sky piercing through, the effect is of intricately designed leaded
glass.
Then there is the soft footfall of holy places, for the entire temple
is carpeted evenly with clover or sensitive plant (which helps keep
down tall weeds). The sensitive plant unrolls a gray rug ahead of
one, for even the vibrations of one's approach are enough to wilt
these hypersensitive leaves. The spiny shadows of the palm fronds
are violet at the gray pillars, deeply blue on the green carpet.
There is perspective not to be seen in full sunlight; there is
loftiness and distance, yet one feels sheltered--which is the comfort
of churches. At night there are even the lamps of the faithful.
Fallen palm fronds are gathered into piles and burned, and these
pyres are everywhere down the long avenues, lighting the surrounding
pillars and ceiling in an eerie orange glow and filling the roof with
smoke. When the moon is full, sending down its white shafts of light
through the fronds and smoke, the rays look like those coming from
heaven in the old church pictures of the Nativity. The
late-afternoon sun illumines the whole cathedral with sharp fingers
of light which beam out from the shafts so that even the shadows
gleam. Those X-rat planes of superimposed patterns make a "modern"
masterpiece, but even so, the picture is one easier to describe than
paint.
But it is not until one rides out through the plantation just after
sunrise that one sees the handiwork of the hidden insect life. The
spiders, which must have worked all night, have stretched gigantic
webs from one pillar to the next, catching the points on low-hanging
fronds. The night's dew is still on them and, fanning out in the
dawn's breeze, they glitter in the oblique rays of the morning sun.
Curtain after curtain of these strung diamonds turns the cathedral
into a fantastic fairyland.
# Chapter 13
For every plantation has either a store or a stock of trade goods.
The planter doles out the weekly shilling wage, then figuratively, or
even literally, hops over his counter and takes back the shillings
for everything on God's green earth from defunct peroxide (to bleach
the hair) to alarm clocks... There is government price regulation,
but it cannot be enforced unless there are complaints of violation.
[IOW, company-store style exploitation]
Lime, made from powdered coral rock, is the time-honored delouser,
but applied to the scalp it also bleaches the hair.
Chapter 14
[The author received an invitation from a stranger to visit
Tanakombo, a plantation at the west end of the island.]
The real war of these islands, the most persistent and everlasting
and vicious, is not the one between white invaders and the dark
people who own the land, nor the feuds between the natives
themselves, nor yet the one between all humans and the bacteria and
insects and heat. It is the fight of men, both black and white, to
get and keep foothold on the land. For without unceasing vigilance
the vegetation would push the puny human beings right off the islands.
The plantations keep herds of cattle, not for meat or milk but to
graze down any sprouting undergrowth.
... stray banana trees with their huge purple seed hanging toward the
earth--something so "artistic," and frankly biological-looking that
Georgia O'Keefe should always be posed with a propagating banana tree.
Even while I was shaking with cold my nose was hot. Something had
happened to the back of my neck; it felt as if it had been hit with a
club. My eyeballs must be on rubber bands hitched to sore places in
my brain, for every time I moved my eyes I could feel the stretch
clear to the back of my skull. And my spine hurt and all my muscles
and joints, and my skin felt raw and dry even while it was cold and
wet. And I felt very tired and dizzy and hot and cold--and utterly
miserable. I had "it"--malaria.
Only the colt and Margaret, who had been taking preventative quinine,
escaped.
My malaria turned out to be the favorite kind: intermittent. It was
intermittent in forty-eight-hour attacks for about a week and then
quiescent until I caught another chill.
But after the attacks were definitely over, there was a period of
curious elation and energy during which i got more work done than in
any normal time.
# Chapter 15
It was her voice that best prepared us for our new misses. In the
dark of the beach as we landed over the surf, and above the road of
this, had come a cultured English voice exclaiming with un-English
enthusiasm, "Oh, I'm SO glad you could come right away." ... Then
hastily, "I get so lonely here by myself." The first appeal toward
endearing one human to another: that one is needed by the other.
... after dinner we were sitting in a row along the south veranda,
our legs in pyjamas as mosquito protection, and those legs
comfortable up on the veranda railing. Margaret and I had our
"wha-whas" (ukulele and guitar) and we were all singing those find
old English madrigals which sounded magnificent under the huge roof.
The sky to the south and east was changing tones like one of those
color organs. There was something special about eh evening; perhaps
it was relief from the storm of the afternoon. The Misses suddenly
pulled her legs up like a little girl, "Oh, I don't know when I've
felt so jolly!"
# Chapter 16
The wharf strike was still on in Sydney and no one was getting any
freight... there were no paints for us.
He [the captain] thought he was being funny, cheering us up, and he
HAD struck something. Sail canvas? What was the matter with it?
And boat paint? It was not permanent, but what of it? Our studies
would all have to be copied anyway. It was pigment and we could mix
colors with it.
The Voy turned us loose with the ship carpenter and the first thing
we got was ten pounds of white-lead paste. It was poisonous and
dangerous for a painter to use... The read lead... was a fine
vermilion. Then there was a quart of black paint and some spar
varnish. That was all the pigment we could get. From a large bucket
of brushes we chose some well-made varnish brushes which we proposed
cutting down into smaller brushes. We could have all the turpentine
and linseed oil we wanted, and we took it.
While the Mataram was still loading... we had broadcast our need of
pigments to the planters on board, and all week long tins of paint
were coming in by runner. We got the most awesome collection of boat
and housepaint that ever came through the bush. Most of it was
half-used and dried to a paste--which could not have been better for
our use, because we wanted paste pigment. But the colors!
Everything from liquid yellows to sour greens; almost everything that
is known to be impermanent to the color chemist.
[The book contains many details about making their own brushes,
easel, frames, etc.]
These were native women doing what Melanesian Maries have done for
centuries: bringing in the harvest from the gardens. And behind the
line, about ten yards to the rear, was a Melanesian man doing what
men have been doing for centuries. Rather, he was the vestigial
remains of a traditional masculine inactivity. The man was not
exactly young but he was not so old and weak that he could not have
been carrying something when even the children were seriously
burdened. Yet all he had in his hand was a dainty cupid-sized bow
and some arrows. He was simply a tradition, a male "protection" to
the pack-mule females. Today, in the government-controlled villages
along the coast, there is naturally no danger of raids, but the
custom of sending a male escort with the women persists.
["Maries" was the old missionary name for women.]
# Chapter 17
Painting at last! And this was the fun end of the picture; the first
unafraid hour when one slaps on the big color patterns. You feel
like God making things grow on a blank canvas. Then follows the
shaping up when objects are given bulk, and lines greater meaning.
But as the detail grew on my canvas I began to forget my admiration
for my own godliness in wonder at the artistry of the [natives] who
had built those huts. ... these were no shacks. The hut nearest me
was architecturally as well proportioned as the Parthenon; the deep
thatching of the roof was just the right "weight" to balance the area
of the front wall; the width of the whole was right for the height,
and the construction throughout was beautiful. There was not a
slipshod piece of workmanship anywhere. Those little... bungalows,
made with only an axe and knife (modern), were as trim and sturdy and
altogether all right as the houses one would see in any civilized
self-respecting community. But the true artistry of these
structures, which was almost marked enough to have been
sophistication, lay in the total absence of any unnecessary material.
And no material had been tortured into an unnatural form to make it
look like something else. ... everything that had been done as a
necessity had been done so painstakingly that it had become
ornamental. This was functionalism of a high order, and it did the
heart good.
It was some time before we saw the interiors of these huts and we
found them just as satisfactory as the exteriors.
This construction of the bed with bamboo slats also had another
virtue which we learned about later. Heat is one of the time-honored
remedies for bad spirits that lodge in the body and hurt a fellow.
So, if [someone] aches, a mound of hot rocks is put under the bed,
and the heat comes up between the slats of the bead and bakes out the
spirit. (After we heard about this we began treating our island
sores with dry heat... and got much more rapid healings.)
# Chapter 18
However, it was impossible to do anything without these men because
the women could not understand much pidgin English. And evidently
the women could be reached, both lingually and ethnically, only
through their husbands.
Anything we gave a woman for posing, her husband would naturally
take, because he owned her; she was only a pack mule.
[The native women] do not work half so hard and long as the average
American farm-wife, partly, of course, because all of living is so
simple and there are no artificial standards of what is decent.
The average birth receives as much delicate attention as and a whole
lot more privacy than it does in our society.
... the men do all the muscle work; the felling of trees for house
timber and the building of the houses, clearing for the gardens, as
well as enough liter work like hunting and fishing to keep them
equally busy with the women. The care of the children is shared, for
after the nursing and toddling period little boys accompany their
fathers through the day and little girls their mothers, each learning
as play the jobs they will have as adults. Thus by the time the
villager is adolescent he [or she] is bearing his [or her] share of
the community work, unconscious of its being work as he [or she] is
of breathing.
Somehow, whatever there is about a female is simply poison to a man's
industry. Fishing canoes sink, papaya trees wither and die, and pigs
fail to reproduce if we pollute them by touch or even by being
present at the wrong time.
# Chapter 20
She never thanked us, because no formal expression of gratitude is
known to Melanesians; the return gift is the form.
The reason the babies never cried, we discovered, was that they were
never denied anything they asked for. If a whimper did start up it
was plugged by the breast being shoved into the baby's mouth.
There was the most surprising indifference toward Art here; not even
the models appeared to be interested in their own likenesses. They
had to be ASKED to look at them, and if the other women were asked
for an opinion they just cackled.
... this was one of the villages where the youngsters began
experimenting with the urge as soon as they were old enough to feel
it. The parents were so very indulgent that they just thought it
amusing. And as the young girls never became pregnant until after
they were married--for some reason even scientists do not understand
fully--no one had a substantial reason for being prudish.
# Chapter 21
When the New Year came around we were in the west islands on a
plantation in the "largest land-locked lagoon in the world." There
was a superb vista of Marovo Lagoon from the backhouse at Segi.
The view was a different from that of a coast plantation as if we
were in another part of the world. It was intimate, cozy; the sort
of thing one reads about as an "island paradise." All up and down
the lagoon, which we could see from the throne on the hill, was a
labyrinth of little coral-made islands and waterways that had a
varying depth and a snow-white coral sea-bottom. That made the clues
of the water every shade from deep purplish ultramarine to peacock
and robin's-egg blue. And there were streaks of tender green and
yellow where the coral castles reached near the surface.
There was a strong tide current through the lagoon but somehow the
water never got rough, and in between spring tides the surfaces were
so glassy that all the cozy little islands and sunset clouds were
reflected in it like a mirror. Gone was the constant roar of the
surf, the churning of it, and the sight of squalls passing out to
sea. Here at Segi the silence and stillness of everything was the
kind that let you hear your own heart bumping.
Sartorially we had gone native. Night and day, at the plantations
and painting in villages, we lived in men's shapeless pyjamas because
they were the coolest protection from insects... But our guilt was
that we did not seem to CARE--not until these holidays came to remind
us of another life we had once lived.
Also, something we had not seen on women elsewhere, these three had
long hair which stood up in a great round ball around their faces.
It had the surprising effect of making them look feminine in a normal
human way.
# Chapter 23
So far as models went it was a holiday painting in Marovo Lagoon.
The ex-headhunters were handsome, intelligent, unsuspicious, pleased
to earn a few sticks of tobacco (though they preferred shillings),
and one and all thought the pictures we painted were miracles. They
were subjects which portraitists dream about but never meet in
civilization.
# Chapter 24
We never could understand for a long time why Europeans ate expensive
tinned fish when there were oceans of fresh ones all around them; and
we continued eating fresh fish whenever we were on our own until one
day we broke out with what we called "fish mouth." [The author
writes more about this in chapter 32.]
The attitude toward professional artists in Melanesia was naturally
very interesting to us. The professional artists are the canoe
carvers and mask carvers and they are hired to make things just as
are our commercial artists. Their products are respected, but
neither the villagers nor the artists themselves regard artists as
personages deserving special privileges, as we do. They are still
obliged to carry on their traditional work in the village, helping
others to build their houses, clearing the bush for gardens, and
hunting and fishing, exactly as are the other men who lack talent.
All villagers, both men and women, make all their own decorations for
everyday use, such as carved food bowls and lime containers. Objects
for ceremonial or communal use, however, are made entirely by
professionals; and as all such property is endowed with metaphysical
significance there are taboos against the making of it.
[A local carver used a pencil to draw the author and her assistant.
He drew them in the same style that he carved canoes with. See top
of this log entry for a link to the resulting portrait.]
Referring to Maike's portrait of the Expotition again, it will be
noticed that he gave me a highwayman's mask. [This represented the
author's countenance while dealing with struggles] ... of the lowest
ebb in our spirits of the entire painting venture so far.
[The author began to go blind as a result of tropical sun glare while
painting. She speculated that while scientists thought the anatomy
of their eyes was no different, there must be some reason why the
native people never went blind from sun glare.]
The instant i put [diving] goggles on I had the solution to painting
in the tropics without going blind. They made my eyes like a
native's. Where the native's eyes are deeply set with a projecting
awning of prominent brow ridges and bushy eyebrows, small eye
openings, and high cheekbones to shut off some of the glare from the
ground, the diving goggles (with the glass knocked out) sheltered my
eyes all around in the same way. The goggles proved to be a godsend,
for I never afterward had trouble with my eyes when I wore them.
# Chapter 25
We [Americans] are the carnivores of the human species, dreadfully
scented according to the [Asians], while the Melanesians, like the
Chinese, are almost vegetarians and so only mildly fragrant.
# Chapter 26
A few years ago--anyone who turned his [or her] radio on then will
remember very well--there wailed through our air, night and day, a
song by that name. Those who like good tunes will remember "Night
and Day" as a very good tune indeed, and that is all it will mean to
most. But for your Expotition it is a melody both horrible and
wonderful, a kind of past-delirium...
Many a meal had we sung for, and many a model both white and brown,
had Margaret held enchanted with her music while I lopped his [or
her] head onto canvas...
In Ongong Java it is the custom, one a year, for the young
marriageable girls, stripped entirely naked, to walk in procession
with their clan chaperons around the village clearing. Betrothals
are arranged in infancy, but the girl appearing in the procession is
a sign to her fiancé that she is ready for marriage. The dark
bodies shone with coconut oil which they dressed themselves for this
important debut... They were rounded about the thigh, the torsos
were long and elegant with smooth shoulders and high breasts. One
did not look at their faces even in the photographs. Chances are the
young patrol officer didn't either even in the flesh, nor care much
that the girl he saw in the procession was already "taken."
# Chapter 28
The usual charge for transportation anywhere in the islands is by the
day; $5 a person whether the vessel is a Sydney steamer or a put-put
launch. And there is no guarantee of getting you there. No matter
how long the trip takes, com fair weather or foul, whether the engine
lisps or the skipper would rather go on a reef than use his [or her]
anchor or sail, a passenger can only set his [or her] teeth and keep
on paying a pound a day till some sweet providence sees him [or her]
in his [or her] home port.
The toilet proper was a round hole in the wide shelf of the taffrail,
in front of which a blanket was hung from the awning roof. [It had a
pleasant view,] even though like a French pissoir it gave the
occupant the illusion of privacy while declaring to the world, by the
feet extending below the blanket, that it was engaged.
But WHY were we going south?
He was going on a recruiting trip!
Recruits for the New Guinea gold fields were then bringing in a
hundred dollars a head in Rabaul, they were hard to get because the
news had got around the islands that carriers to the fields died of
cold and exhaustion in the high mountains. No doubt the Skipper was
being only an opportunist in going recruiting when he found himself
at the remote end of the Territory; but also he could profit by the
venture even if he did not get recruits, because we were paying him
ten dollars a day while he found out if men were available.
But that was not what was making us savage; it was the low fellow's
attempt to slip off without us.
The one full-length sentence the Skipper had honored us with in the
last eight hours was a warning not to get nosy in this village. Any
violation of taboo would ruin his business. But in the end it was
our quite unintentional nosiness which indirectly promoted it--as far
as his business went.
At first we wandered about, innocently trying to look up into the
closed houses through the cracks in the floors--for the huts were on
piles like the plantation houses. We were at the far end of the
village taking a photograph of an architectural detail (which
happened to be an ingenious vine-rope hinge of a door) when that door
opened--ever so little; just about an inch and a half. A glittering
eye looked out of the blackness at about head height. So it was an
adult--but male or female? We took a chance. Calmly we lifted our
pyjama shirts and exhibited proof of our right to female society.
There was a long wait; then the crack of the door slowly widened and
was finally jerked back and a woman pushed out. Another woman was
behind her, and another, and two more. Their general good nature led
us to believe that we were the first white women these Maries had
ever seen. But there was nothing we could paint of that. We
photographed it instead, and it was at this point the luluai [leader]
came sprinting up. He couldn't speak any pidgin English that we
could understand, but he LOVED cameras and he did not have to say it.
... we had accomplished in half an hour with the camera what the
Skipper had not been able to do in several hours.
The whole business of recruiting is nothing more complex than making
a friend of the chief or luluai of the village, who then persuades
village men to join the recruiter. The maximum value of a gift to a
headman is set by law, because the chiefs bribed beyond resistance
could be persuaded to turn over to the recruiter men who were not
willing to be recruited.
In this village it happened that the chief's weakness was having a
camera pointed at him; and we had the camera.
If there is anything less delightful than walking up mountains on
blisters, it is having a rest and then walking down on the same
blisters.
# Chapter 29
Kieta, as a settlement, was not particularly noteworthy. But Kieta
to us looked like a beautiful metropolis after our seeing only one
house at a time for so many months.
[The author and her assistant got foot infections as a result of the
damage done during the Skipper's "death march" into the mountains on
the recruiting trip.]
This settlement never had any more than 25 residents, yet there were
as many rungs on the social ladder as there were residents. The
untouchables were the Chinese, the missionaries, and Americans,
whenever present. [Suffice it to say, the author and her assistant
were treated with outright aggression.
[They had trouble finding anywhere to stay. Nobody wanted to rent
them a room. The radio operator had an enormous house with rows of
bedrooms, none of them occupied but his own.] But obviously nothing
short of outright seduction could get this young man to make
questionable women of us [by letting them stay in one of his empty
rooms.]
[Finally, a couple from Rabaul made a special trip down to the wharf
to ask the author and her assistant to be their guests.]
# Chapter 30
For Rabaul was that island metropolis, the one big settlement in all
Melanesia where we had long expected to replenish our bleeding store
of gold. An acute reminder of the emergency was that the Nakapo did
not choose to sail. For two more days the vessel lay off that
hateful little settlement of Kieta, during which time we dared not
move far from the deck or beach because the Skipper said every next
minute was the one in which we were leaving. He was waiting for
business...
On the second night we went ashore for dinner. The wireless operator
sent a message that he wanted us to meet some friends... They were
three young men, all in government service, and before the evening
was over they had got together a splendid scheme for
Expotitions-in-distress. They would provide us with a complete field
outfit--camp stretchers, mosquito nets, cooking gear... and we could
set up camp in the government rest house of the nearest village to
Kieta. ... but our hosts were "gamin." It couldn't be done [because
of various patriarchal social customs.]
Well, it COULD be done--unless the mute district officer did refuse
us permission to use a rest house; all we had to do was obtain camp
gear, and we could but that. It would be fairly inexpensive living,
we should be independent, and by living right in the village we
should become quickly acquainted with our subjects and have less
trouble getting models. There was just one hitch of convincing the
district officer that we were not fragile ladies but tough
headhunters. [They did not accomplish this and they ended up getting
back on the Nakapo for Rabaul.]
# Chapter 31
The hook of land on the inner shore of which Rabaul is situated is
called Crater Peninsula, the bar formed by the crook being the
gigantic crater of an old volcano. In the middle of the bar there
are some little "beehive" islands which appear and disappear at whim,
indicating that something is still going on down there in the water,
and to the south, still in Blanche Bay, is another island called
Vulcan. The first thing the nose of a sensitive visitor sniffs as he
[or she] enters the bay, if the wind is right, is the stench of
sulphur and brimstone which rises in steam from these safety valves
of the volcanic region.
The government reports show about twenty healthy earthquakes a year,
disturbances violent enough to receive official attention, which
means the [unreported] tremors one feels every few days are just
normal.
There is no doubt that living in Rabaul is something like living in a
reducing vibrator. There is something in this "uncanny quiet," an
electric charge that is not the invigorating kind but rather the
tenseness that sometimes makes small boys suddenly take a crack at a
glass window with a rock, as much to their [own] surprise as
anybody's.
When we said we wished we had been at the party [in a cheap hotel]
instead of having been merely shaken by it, the little man was so
pleased that he made us an additional present of some small gold-ore
nuggets fresh from the mountains of New Guinea.
And it was this man, learning my name, who brought about quite an
unusual encounter. That night at dinner he brought to our table
another old prospector who shyly asked how I spelled my name. He had
once prospected in Alaska and had known a Lewis Mytinger who had come
to Juneau with a gold washer, and the two had known one another
intimately before the latter was drowned. Lewis Mytinger was my
father, whom I had never known. He had invented a gold washer and
taken it to Juneau to interest investors. And from this miner here
in far-away New Guinea I learned things about the last few months of
my father's life and the details of the way he met his death that
even my mother did not know. "You look just like your father," the
miner said. "I think I would have known you were Lew's daughter even
if I had not yet heard your name--especially meeting you here, at
another gold field." And probably in the same kind of hotel.
It was the American recruiters who, in our ninth hour of despair,
steered us to the Ambassador. The name, Ambassador, was entirely
humorous for the place was a huge frame building, as spacious as a
hangar and looking very much like one, which had been built by the
government as the expropriation department to handle the land tangle
when the Australians took over during the last war. Offices were
partitioned off on both sides of a long hall, and at one end was a
big open space, the size of Roseland, which was not the one
restaurant in town... The rooms were so much the size of largish
stalls that some humorist had lettered the names of famous race
horses on a few doors. There was, of course, no furniture, no
running water; the toilet was off the restaurant (through the
kitchen), and the wash-wash houses were in the read on a court. But
the rent was only twenty dollars a month and we expected to furnish
our stall with a camp outfit. We could eat one meal a day in the
restaurant and lift our hands to help ourselves in private without
the aid of a [servant], or endangering white prestige [the
sensibilities of other white people in the community].
The way for a woman to is a stranger to tackle the social ladder in
any British colonial settlement is a cut-and-dried system. She
starts at the top simply by leaving her card at the Residency. This
is merely paying one's formal respects, and the card leaver must,
under no circumstances, be seen in the flesh by anyone but a servant.
Literally it means, "I have arrived and am ready for recognition."
Presumably there are spies who then track one down and report whether
one is eligible for (a) dinner, (b) luncheon, (c) tea, or (d) total
eclipse. There must be some way of finding out about the newcomer
other than by a mere name on a card.
The Expotition had no card and it had sore feet and Namanula Hill was
an alp which no bicycle we could pedal would go up. And it was also
very hot and we had no calling clothes which were fit to be seen even
by a servant. The whole business seemed a little strained to an
American anyway--to hire a car to climb an alp to deliver a card
which we did not have, in order to be followed by spies who would
report that we were living in a horse stall.
However, we had to do it if we expected to get any portrait orders.
[Later, New Guinea's first lady invited them to dinner without any
card calling. She had already heard about them through the
grapevine. She also ordered their first portrait job.]
# Chapter 32
With no portrait orders coming in yet we neither dared afford nor
wanted to eat more than one meal at day at Popeye's, the restaurant
in the building, for the food there was useless from the point of
view of both taste and nourishment. [Eventually their servant,
"borrowed" from a friend, volunteered to shop for groceries and cook
their meals.]
... the trays were neat and the fruit mountainous, and we never again
got dysentery while Tombat fed us.
Instead, we got... "fis' mouth" [fish mouth]--from eating too much
fish or else the wrong kind. The curse came in the form of little
white bubbles that broke out, not only around the mouth but around
the eyes. It was a maddening itch much like poison ivy infection,
though luckily it lasted only a few days at siege.
[I wonder whether "fish mouth" is the same thing as Scombroid Fish
Poisoning.]
# Chapter 35
I had found a retreat in the Chinese cemetery behind town to which I
went occasionally for the sweet stillness that was nowhere else in
Rabaul. One could visualize the long-dead [Asians] beneath those big
green mounds, and one was reminded of the precious life still
ours--and what to do with it. And I needed stimulus these days.
Frankly I was weary. It is all great fun to travel sight-seeing
through the tropics, but to work is another matter--when the heat
makes one feel drugged, unable to think, and when each siege of
malaria leaves one a little more slowly. Then there was the eternal
bucking of unexpected obstacles. [Nobody was ordering portraits,
because her first commission had gone badly.] And if this stalemate
continued we were doomed as an Expotition. Our limit was the moment
when our funds got down to the price of a ticket home, and that was
within sight.
But I always came away from the cemetery with my fur smoothed down;
the one thing we possessed which was not in that quiet green terminal
was breath. And that was something positive.
That we could not understand their kind of intellect did not prove
that it did not exist ant was not equal to our own in its own way.
Our models had sores and flies, but we had them too, and ants in our
pants as well--ourselves having pants, which the natives had probably
tried as a garment themselves and discarded generations ago as being
ant traps.
# Chapter 36
Our artistic swan song of the Territory was an attempt to paint a
sing-sing [a dance], and for even attempting that we deserve some
credit.
There are generally two kinds of sing-sing: the dance and feat and
chanting that attend the coming of age ceremonies of girls, and
betrothals, marriages, and births, which are witnessed by all the
villagers; and those other secret dances which have to do with men's
clubs and are not always initiation ceremonies, but may be the
whooping up for a raid, or celebration of a successful one. These
latter, the native women and outsiders never see.
Another kind of sing-sing has an innocent origin purely social, and
may be witnessed by anyone. The theme is some current event. When
we left a plantation in the Solomon Islands, the native wife of a
planter, accompanied by all her female relatives, collected on the
veranda to watch us pack. For hours they sat without a word,
fascinated by the wealth that went into the trunks. Margaret brought
things while I fitted them into their places that I knew so well by
this time. There was probably a certain rhythm to the endless
business. Finally we came to the clothes trunk and after
half-a-dozen garments had been folded down into it one of the women
began to hum with her lips closed.
The women stopped to laugh hysterically with the others and then
started humming again, hanging on to the sixth note each time she
came to it. Presently, another woman joined in, starting on the
fourth note, repeating the same melody. Another woman came in and
then all were humming. It was a kind of protracted round, like
"Three Blind Mice." They hummed for a long time, good straight
missionary harmony, and then suddenly the first woman broke into a
solo, still using only harmonics of the six notes. "My word," she
improvised, "the Missus are going away. They are going... going.
They put into the box the white dress, the white dress, the white
dress. [Three dresses.] They are going away on a launch. They are
going away on the steamer. The tall one who makes pictures, the
small one who sings with her teeth [that is, whistles]. My word,
they go tomorrow."
The music did not come to an end there. The humming continued as an
interval and by and by, ever so casually, another woman began her
story of our going, going. And so on through the whole afternoon
until the lock of the last trunk was snapped. There was one
deviation; the woman who started the sing got up on one occasion and
shyly went through an awkward pantomime of bringing things and
placing them in a box, her walking back and forth being a business of
standing in the same place and coming down on the veranda hard with
her heels, which seems to be the universal Melanesian dance step.
# Chapter 37
But on account of the earthquake we made a discovery that was
serious. When we moved into the Ambassador we had unrolled and hung
the pictures face to the wall, around the walls of the storeroom so
that they would be straight while they finished drying out. And now,
as a result of last night's shaking, they were all lying crumpled on
the floor. But it was not the wrinkling that had done the damage.
It was in picking them up that we saw what Rabaul had done, what the
weeks of exposure to the sulphuric atmosphere can do to paint. Every
portion that had been painted with lead colors had been affected.
White areas had turned golden yellow, but all colors mixed with white
had dulled and in most cases turned darker. Some greens had turned
black even where the paint had been used pure and, of course, the
madder red, which I had not expected to hold up anyway (for the
madders are merely a glaze), had faded out of existence. The chance
in our pictures and our dismay were about equal.
Ordinary sulphur discoloration on paintings happens... right here in
our own country, where sulphur dioxide in the air is created in the
cities by coal-burning house and factory furnaces. To clean it off,
picture restorers charge a great deal of money to run over the
paintings with a lump of fresh rye bread, a slice of raw potato, or
onion. Only don't start cleaning your paintings with any of these
vegetables, because if the discoloration has penetrated the varnish
to the pigment beneath, the varnish has to be removed, and this is a
delicate job for which restorers deserve a great deal of money.
[Nothing they tried helped, until they tried soap and water. It
brightened the paintings somewhat.]
The paintings were dried, not only on the paint side, but more
thoroughly on the back, and then they were given several coats of
good old deck spar varnish. And as an extra precaution against
mold-rot, after several coats of varnish with their seasoning of
insects, the canvases were put out in the sun again face down to bake
the back.
... we had to decide between retracing our steps (the Solomon
Islands) under the ideal conditions of being able to work wherever
the expedition schooner anchored, and having it as a permanent base;
going on to the unknown in Papua and the Dutch Indies; or going home
via the Philippines, with the work unfinished. We made one of those
heroic decisions that happen only in fiction. We decided to take a
chance--go west. [to Papua]
[They planned to ship the paintings back home. But the natives went
on strike for higher wages one morning shortly after the author
departed. The paintings were forgotten and left in a storeroom for
months.
The Judge and the newspaper Editor got into a dispute. The Editor
used the paintings as an instrument for spite. Ultimately, he hid
them before he himself disappeared.
An eruption destroyed Vulcan island.]
The explosion of Matapi was a hundred times more violent than that of
Vulcan the day before, and it rose a mile in the air at the speed of
a torpedo. The geyser was solid black mud, a fountain of mud that
rained down on the peninsula.
All vegetation looked as if it had been struck by poison gas. In the
harbor all light craft had been sunk, including the precious Nakapo,
and everything remaining above water was under four feet of mud and
pumice.
The two major eruptions continued through Monday, but the wind was
offshore and the mud and pumice were being carried away from Rabaul.
Our Melanesian paintings escaped the mud bath on the peninsula. They
had long since been located by the loyal Judge and were safely in our
possession when this district fulfilled its promise of "becoming the
theatre of some horrible catastrophe."
author: Mytinger, Caroline, 1897-1980
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Caroline_Mytinger
LOC: DU850 .M9
source: gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/ia/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.177751
tags: ebook,travel
title: Headhunting in the Solomon Islands
# Tags
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travel
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